www.lamiajoreige.com
The Politics of Display: Lebanon's Postwar Art
Scene
Sarah Rogers, 2006
The international art world's curiosity in postwar Lebanon followed almost a decade
after the 1989 Ta'if Accord brought an official end to the War (1975-1989). In
particular, critics have focused their attention on a group of mixed media artists whose
practices interrogate the memory the War. This body of work has been featured in
exhibitions such as Documenta (2002), DisORIENTation: Contemporary Arab Artists
from the Middle East at the House of Cultures (2003), the Venice Biennale (2003), and
the premiere of Catherine David's series, Tamass: Contemporary Arab Representations
(2002). In addition, these artists have graced the pages of Flash Art, Parachute, Art
Forum International and Bidoun. Over fifteen years of civil strife has thus produced
one of the region's most notable contemporary art movements. This configuration of
violence as a culturally regenerative force is not unique to art history- one need only
recall Picasso's 1937 work, Guernica. Yet critics locate aesthetic value in the event of
the War rather than experimental strategies, which engage contemporary debates on the
status of visual as evidence. In other words, the works are made to display a politics of
identity rather than a politics of the visual. This paper thus begins to consider the
implications of awarding the War the primary role in reinvigorating Beirut's art scene.
Despite- or perhaps because of- Lebanon's official policy of postwar amnesia, a group
of artists have stepped forward and initiated a series of projects which critically
examine the War in its aftermath. Recounting stories of historians, photographers,
martyrs, and hostages- some fictitious and others real- the artists bring together archival
documents from the War. The visual material- photographs, videos, and scrapbooks- is
presented as found, titled, and filed regardless of its historical veracity. Despite the
occasional accusation of artistic trickery, this work has generated much acclaim in its
blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction. In particular, critics have framed
this body of work as a metaphor for Lebanon's current political, social, and cultural
situation. This characterization would seem especially fitting considering the black and
white signs simply stating, "the truth," which have come to decorate Beirut's visual
landscape following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Yet as I
hope to demonstrate through a reading of two projects- Walid Ra'ad's The Atlas Group
and Lamia Joreige's Here and Perhaps Elsewhere- this body of work implicates itself
within a history of the War in order to provoke broader questions concerning our
expectations of visual representation defined as both "art" and "history."
Since the inclusion of his work, Missing the Lebanese Civil Wars: Documents from the
Atlas Group in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, much ink has been spilled in Lebanon,
Europe, and the U.S. over Walid Ra'ad. Through lecture format, Ra'ad introduces his
audience to The Atlas Group, a non-profit institution with the mission of serving as a
visual repository for the Lebanese War. Identifying himself as a founding member,
Ra'ad claims he will present several recent projects without critical commentary. Each
project represents an individual's documentation of the War- scrapbooks, home movies,
and video testimonies- which have since been donated to the Atlas Group. In fact, the
institution and its contents are Ra'ad's creations. Alluding to the work's fictitious
nature, Ra'ad states in the beginning of his lecture, "These tapes do not document what
happened, but what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted,
what can appear as rational, sayable, and thinkable about wars." Yet he proceeds on in
documentary fashion to introduce us- and not without a degree of humor- to those
stories which might have taken place in the shadows of the War's main events. One
such character is Dr. Fadl Fahkouri. According to Ra'ad, Dr. Fakhouri is 'the foremost
historian of the Lebanese Civil Wars,' who recently passed away and entrusted his
notebooks to The Atlas Group. In one notebook, Dr. Fakhouri meticulously documents
the activities of the major historians of the Lebanese Civil War who met every Sunday
at the racetrack. There, the men would bet on how many fractions of a second before or
after the winning horse crossed the finish line that the track photographer would shoot
his photograph. Each page of Dr. Fakhouri's notebook obsessively records the
following information: the historians' initials and bets, the calculation of averages, the
time of the winning historian, the photograph from the newspaper, and a short
handwritten description of the winning historian. Three methods of assimilating data
are thus included: statistics, photography, and text. Ironically, however this work
documents the inability of photography-often ascribed the status of the real- to capture
on film the moment the horse crosses the finish line. Instead, the photograph is always
fractions of a second off: a metaphor for history's inability to seize the absence of the
past in the present. Moreover, the act of gambling can be read as a metaphor for
historical narration in its desire to instill coherency into contingency.
Sharing Ra’ad’s interest in questioning agency and authenticity is Lamia Joreige's film,
Here and Perhaps Elsewhere- a title lifted from Jean-Luc Goddard's 1976 documentary.
In the work, Joreige walks along the Green Line asking individuals, "Do you know
anyone who was kidnapped here during the War?" Along the way, she encounters a
variety of answers: those who are excited to participate in what they assume is a
documentary made by a reporter, those who curse Joreige for raising the hope of
families whose relatives are missing, others who demand to know why this question is
being asked after the fact when Palestinians are disappearing right now, and of course,
the obligatory invitations to coffee. Joreige's question triggers memories and in doing
so, initiates the process of historical narration- both in its construction and repression.
As we learn at the end of the film, Joreige's uncle was kidnapped in this neighborhood
during the War (interestingly enough, her brother is also an artist in whose work the
missing uncle makes an appearance). The work is situated on the cusp of historical and
fictional narration because as audience members, we are not quite sure if this is in fact a
documentary. In other words, as viewers, we are taken through a journey which does
not end in either information or answers- a ghost hunt of sorts. The different responses
determine neither the name of those who were kidnapped nor those who did the
kidnapping. Furthermore, Joreige herself has acknowledged in an interview the
difficulty in securing funding due to the work's disciplinary uncertainty.
In this brief discussion of these two projects, I hope to have demonstrated the ways in
which they are conceptually and formally united in their performance of the
documentary aesthetic. Both artists deploy those media- video and photography- which
allow representation to overtake reality in order to bring to the forefront the disciplinary
uncertainties haunting the process of historical narration. The artists thus confront the
conflicting task of the visual: both to capture and question history. Ironically, in doing
so, they archive the aftermath of the War. The artist, in other words, has assumed the
role of the critical historian. Yet the question remains, is the War the sole benefactor of
these emerging practices?
In the decades before the War, the debates over Lebanon's national identity failed to
register visually. In fact, the art historian Sylvia Naef has characterized the modern art
movement in Lebanon- in contrast to Egypt and Iraq- by this very lack of a politically
engaged art. No art collectives were formed and no manifestoes were written. This is
not to claim that art and politics operated in separate realms; they never do. And this
was certainty not the case during the sixties when Beirut assumed the role of cultural
capital of the Arab world from Cairo and Baghdad. For example, Cesar Nammour and
Wadeh Fares, founders of Contact Gallery (1972) recall curating an exhibition in the
summer of 1972 by a Vietnamese artist protesting the Vietnam War which had been
rejected by its initial venue at the Kennedy Center in Beirut- not too surprising.
According to Fares, the exhibition was so successful that it was extended by 2 months.
Moreover, art centers were established with the specific agenda of bringing together
aesthetics and politics. One such example was Dar al-Fan, the House of Art, which
Janine Rubeiz opened in 1967 in response to the lack of support for the arts from the
public sector. In her unpublished memoirs, Rubeiz recounts that although there were
other active cultural centers in Beirut at the time, they were run by foreigners.
Consequently, Rubeiz and her circle felt the need for a center where, "nous sentions
chez nous," (we felt at home). Quite active, the center held 240 conferences over an
eight-year period in addition to poetry readings, musical concerts, exhibitions, film
showings, and plays. Acknowledging the potential for nostalgia, one notes in Rubeiz's
memoirs that the conferences often resulted in intense debates due to the number of
opinions included on topics such as the role of oil in the region, confessionalism in
Lebanon, the role of creativity, and gender. Yet this political activism did not translate
explicitly into formal terms in Lebanese art; perhaps this is a result of a market, which-
to this day- is dominated by paintings sold for the domestic setting. Emerging postwar
practices therefore stand in contrast to the work of the previous generation in more
ways than choice of medium.
Despite refutes that they are not a collective, the postwar generation of artists have
become at the very least, a loose association of artists, colleagues, and friends whose
work shares similar representational strategies. With few exceptions the majority left
Lebanon during the eighties to attend universities in Europe and the U.S. Joreige, for
example, studied graphic arts in France and cinema and painting at Rhode Island
School of Design. Ra'ad also studied in the U.S., receiving his Ph.D. in Cultural
Studies from the University of Rochester after deviating from his medical studies at
Boston University to pursue photography. Following the end of the War, they returned
to Beirut and since then, have become individually and collectively associated through
the curatorial projects of Ashkal Alwan. Established by Christine Tohme in 1994,
Ashkal Alwan is one of the few non-profit arts organizations in Lebanon and has gained
a reputation for sponsoring projects in public spaces throughout the city and abroad.
Some of the artists were friends beforehand whereas others were introduced to each
other through Tohme. With little separation between producers of art and critics, many
artists write about their work and that of their peers and the footnotes are littered with
references to Sigmund Freud, Fredric Jameson, Walter Benjamin, and Jean Baudrillard
among other prominent European and American theorists. Moreover, much of the
funding for both individual projects and those of Ashkal Alwan come from outside of
Lebanon. Yet this type of seemingly banal information is often excluded from the
current criticism and thus we are left with a somewhat romantic vision of over fifteen
years of destruction. Perhaps it is not only a national policy of postwar amnesia but
also an art historical one.
The point is this: emerging artistic practices in Lebanon do not derive solely from the
context of the War. Instead, these works engage in the project of writing a local history
while partaking in the global market of culture. Because in the end, the war in Lebanon
was the not the first in which Truth was a victim.